Comment by tmh79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmh79 | Hacker News Reader

I think lab grown meat will radically change how we as humans consume food and its going to taste way better than any animal grown meats we eat today. Animal breeding and husbandry right now is so crude, and there are so many inputs and outputs to optimize, and while meat taste is part of the equation, others factors are meat yield, byproducts, animal health itself (all factors that are important, but are often times in conflict with making the "tastiest" meats). Stage 1 is going to be recreating crude meats like ground beef or sausage, stage 2 will be recreating true single flesh meats like a chicken breast, or a steak, and stage 3 is going to be "designer" meats like a kobe beef recreation, and stage 4 will be "meat insanity", creating "meat like" foods that nature would never be able to produce but that taste incredible (steak balloons, cotton candy like fried chicken, foie gras & tuna marble). Imagine going to a sushi like restaurant where the food is all nigiri style small meat cuts but the meat is all this wild bespoke artificial meats that no animal could ever product, but are wildly tasty.

Optimistic ...

My first thought was that some company will immediately start pumping this fake meat full of growth hormones because ... why the hell not?

"We can make it cheaper, more readily available for the many, for the poor, with the same growth hormones we use on real meat"

And they'll lobby that through ... and people like cheap ... and people will get used to eating absolutely fake meat ... and they'll forget what the real thing actually tasted like.

It'll "taste like chicken" ... but they won't really know what chicken (real, healthy, decent chicken) tastes likes ...

And ... there's a Matrix offshoot here somewhere ...

Yes, and there is precedent! We still have Government Cheese [1], which is just barely related to real cheese. Perhaps Government Meat would be an improvement?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese

Except in countries with a real food safety authority we won't suffer from this problem, so it is up to us to assist third world countries and the US in creating an agency that does its job right.

I would be happier tasting fake meat than having animal suffer for my own taste

Me too. Except for the part where unscrupulous companies then get on board, take it to regulatory limits and beyond ... and make fake meat ... well ... even faker, and dangeorusly so.

Generations from now people will look at how we consume meat with the same distaste but understanding that we give to the Donner party.

Then presumably those same people will look with discust at Moroccans still raising goats/cows/sheep/chickens and killing them for mundane mealtimes and for Sacrifice Day[1]. What will we as a global society do about such a divide in culture as far-reaching as this? Gay marriage requires basically no life-changes from the average person. Why would this not be far more divisive?

Attempting to impose control over where people get their food is the sort of thing that starts wars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_al-Adha is the holiday

I'm genuinely curious why my comment is harmful rather than helpful (that is, why the downvotes?) to the goal of having an insightful conversation about the societal effects of artificial meat. The parent comment points out the possibility for the existence of lab-grown meat to lead to it becoming an enforced norm in some wealthy cultures. My comment points out that such an enforced cultural norm is going to clash sharply with cultural traditions that are a significant part of their lives. Among the questions that follows are:

1) Is there a way for lab-grown meat to become prevalent without it leading to such a clash?

2) Are there things we can do to prevent such a clash from becoming violent?

3) Are there ways for lab-grown meat to be developed in a way that small-scale poor herders in mountains with moderate infrastructure can own its means of production?

4) Is there a way to go into a culture which currently eats meat with every meal[1], take away their means of producing meat, and have it not result in a violent backlash agains whichever organisation is trying to do this?

[1] source: two separate conversations with Moroccan men in March of 2019, one of whom was helping teach a cooking class in Fez and another of whom was leading a food tour of Marrakesh

Sometimes in forums, when someone says something is bad, someone else argues against them calling it bad because it would be hard to make that something illegal, despite nothing about legality having been said. It's a frustrating argument because it implies laws are the only moral standards one should adhere to, and it disregards any possibilities between something being good and 100% legal or bad and 100% illegal. Usually I downvote that kind of response because it just encourages a polarized discussion that embraces a false dichotomy.

ngold's post was ambiguous about whether he expects meat production to become illegal, so I don't think you were wrong to bring legality into the picture and I didn't downvote you, but I can see how someone could think your reply fit the above pattern.

If anything, the energy optimization would be beneficial, since you wouldn't need to grow bones, organs, etc like you would need to do so for regular livestock

And the reduced amount of suffering and pain.

> since you wouldn't need to grow bones, organs

That's the thing - when I eat cuts of meat, I prefer "bone in". If I have the choice, I'll take a chicken drumstick over a nugget, and a bone-in rib-eye over a fillet.

That said, I do like prime rib - but that's actually closer to a slice of roast beef than anything else.

Oh - and bbq brisket - no bones there.

They will also have to figure out how to grow the fat in with the muscle, too. That's where most of the flavor in meat comes from, not to mention texture and tenderness.

As far as organs...well, I do enjoy some tripas every now and again in a taco or burrito...

Have you seen how food is marketed and produced currently? I'm willing to bet it absolutely will not trend towards quality.

I tried some Quorn for the first time recently and that already seems to cover your stage 1 & maybe 2 ("beef" lasagna and "chicken" schnitzel) and it was surprisingly good. The chicken in particular was not really distinguishable from cheaper fast food or frozen schnitzels I'd had in the past (probably says more about them than the Quorn).

Roast chicken with crispy skin seems a while away though.

What kind of meat did you use to eat?

Quorn tastes nothing like an actual chicken. On the other hand I have never tasted fast food chicken nor frozen schnitzels.

I am not saying it is bad, but it has a very particular taste that is definitely NOT related to chicken.

I haven't found any "meat-like" product that would taste even remotely like the real thing. ANd I have tried all the ones available in France and Sweden, which is already quite a lot (my girlfriend is vegetarian so we eat mostly vegetarian).

Most "ground beef" vegetarian equivalents are super dry and taste much more soy than meat, which is OK in itself but when you cook meatballs well.... it is really not the same.

IMO we are not at all at stage 1, and I am not sure we will get there anytime soon. It is not so dramatic though as there are still plenty of things to cook without it, but I'm a bit tired of some people insisting about how vegan alternatives are equal or better than non-vegan product.

It had some cheese included which definitely helped. I was comparing it to frozen schnitzel or other processed chicken (nuggets), which I usually don't choose to eat these days but I've had plenty over the years.

I'm not at all convinced it's healthier either given the length of the ingredient list, but I'll leave that to the experts.

when there are 1000s of companies out there that produces fake meet, I don't think it will be tasty or safe as regular meat and if later killing animals for meat gets banned, people won't have anything to compare it to.

Can you elaborate or provide some rationalization?

It seems like your argument is "if there are lots of companies making fake meat it will be bad" but that doesn't make much sense to me on the surface.

Because technically meat paste is packaged and sold as burgers, depending on how you legally define burgers, meat, and paste.

The world around you is rife with people pushing the quality of goods to the point the market will accept, and then moving the market to accept even worse.

Because fundamentally, morals don’t exist in a market. They are imposed.

And good / bad are subjective. People buy cheap protein. This will be cheap protein.

And even if it is tasteless, texture less and nothing any human will call meat, it will sell as long as it’s opportunity cost is lower than the alternative.

Yeah, you can definitely buy some real cheap, garbage "meat". But you can also buy really high quality, really good meat. It's not like "markets" means everything is of horrible quality.

I think the whole point of GP is that lab grown meat makes it cheaper to produce much higher quality meat. That would actually mean at every price point, you get better quality than you do today. Your comment comes off as aimless pessimism rather than anything actually related to this thread.

> if later killing animals for meat gets banned, people won't have anything to compare it to.

Well, that shouldn't matter in my view. Do we need to keep human slaves around to compare their effectiveness with that of modern robots? If enough people in society see something as "wrong," then the alternative doesn't need to be superior in every way.

> If enough people in society see something as "wrong"

But not enough people do, and I'm not convinced that will change. Also, I would say there's a great difference between human slavery and animals being killed. There are a whole lot of people who probably won't want to switch over to fake-meat, because it's perceived as creepy and weird. Lab grown food (and the idea thereof) just rubs people the wrong way. It's like the people who promulgate insect consumption in the West: it's a cultural issue, and demonizing people because of their culture is not right.

I don't dare guess about a specific schedule, but I'd expect the end state to be meat that is safer, tastes better, and is less expensive.

Safer because it can be grown in sterile conditions, which greatly reduces the risk for contamination by pathogens.

Tastier because it can be more directly engineered for flavor, with fewer constraints. Take a look at how crazy things have to get in order to produce foods with the flavor and texture of veal or foie gras using current technology. Not having to worry about how you're treating an actual animal, or even having to do what it takes to keep the whole animal alive, isn't just going to improve those processes, it's going to open up a lot of other options as well.

Cheaper because it'll be infinitely easier to engineer waste out of the process.

"Grown in sterile conditions" and "cheaper" are two completely contradictory features.

Most agriculture is still done in the field, not indoors, because that's the most efficient way to do it. A large part of the inputs is "just there". Waste doesn't really happen in production, almost everything is put to some use. Real waste happens on the store shelves.

You really have to ask yourself, what are the inputs to the "lab grown" process and what are the requirements towards purity etc. It's an open question.

> Waste doesn't really happen in production

Except for the poop lagoon crisis https://newrepublic.com/article/151242/behind-hurricane-flor...

the dangers of cow farts https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warns-cow-farts-c...

Or the "waste" baby male chicks who are ground alive when they are a day old (graphic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5qAfyUuWE

Or the rain forests wasted to make room for more cows https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/beef-product...

Or that it takes 100 calories inputs to beef production to get 3 calories out. (Beef is 3% efficient). https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

You are mixing up "waste material" with "material waste". The parent was making a point about cost. It's cheaper not to feed male baby chicks. It's cheaper to raze the forest. It's cheaper to let cows fart.

There are externalized costs to these things, but they don't really affect the prices that people are going to pay for the produce, at least not directly. I guess you can charge a small markup for being "green" (or pretending to be).

Now maybe a cow is only "3% efficient" in terms of calories, but the calories it takes in are really cheap and the calories it puts out are prized. It's a profit deal! In engineering, higher efficiency generally is more expensive and the economic optimum is never the efficiency optimum.

Most large-scale food processing, like baking, or sausage / bacon / ham production, or dairy production, is happily indoors. When you don't need to work with entire large organisms, like a cow or a corn plant, things become easier to turn into a factory environment.

What about hunting for meat as a method to responsibly manage deer populations for example? Austin, Texas is having a huge wild boar population explosion because the county instituted a no-kill policy. Also, hunting is a big part of some cultures. Why does one person outside that culture get to decide that's wrong?

People don't hunt to eat today. They hunt for sport!

Some people had a culture of eating other people. Do you think that's wrong?

We pull two deer a year if we're lucky on my farm, we don't grip and grin but we relish in the ability to eat something that shares the land around us.

You're wrong. When I was growing up if we didn't hunt in the winter it means we didn't eat in the Spring.

Do we really need to rehash the issues with moral relativism on HN?

re: managing deer populations. There will always be some harm. We can strive for outcomes with the least harm.

Hunting is as not much the issue as the billion-plus animals we kill everyday for food. If more people had to look an animal in the eye as some hunters do, perhaps more people would connect the animal flesh they eat with the sentient beings the flesh came from.

https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-fo...

Almost all the safety issues with actual meat are around the fact that, well, animals are involved. Contamination on slaughter, which is the big one, wouldn’t be an issue. It should be far easier to make this sort of process safer.

I doubt livestock farming will be banned, but if this works out well it may be economically unviable.

> if later killing animals for meat gets banned, people won't have anything to compare it to.

In the United States, I suspect that a combination of the 1st amendment and at least one religious tradition[1] would prevent any federal or state prohibition on killing animals for meat. Therefore, there will be people who have the experience to compare the two.

[1] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_al-Adha

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EDIT: Actually, I'm probably wrong, based on the precedent that a state may institute a generally-applicable ban on peyote and the 1st amendment doesn't protect individuals who use it in religious rites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Division_v._Smith#M...

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